1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of computer user interface design, and more particularly to user interfaces and methods for improved user collaboration in computer-based work environments.
2. Description of the Background Art
In many workplaces, a significant degree of workers' productivity is based on the ability to directly interact with other workers in order to exchange information about common problems, issues, or concerns. Informal interactions are extremely important for workers who are members of a team or a workgroup sharing various aspects of a common project. Recent research has shown that while informal interactions are responsible for a significant amount of information flow in an organization, they are under-utilized with respect to how effective they are. In particular, recent investigations of information flow in organizations have found that when people wanted to communicate information to others in the organization, they tended to communicate through the hierarchical management chain, using formal mechanisms, such as documents and presentations, even though they did not find these mechanism to be very effective. On the other hand, when workers wanted to find out information from other parts of the organization, they tended to ask other workers who they knew and respected, thus, relying on informal interactions, particularly personal, spoken communications. This research suggests that informal interactions often lead to an improved sense of community in the workplace and team cohesion, more efficient problem solving, and an increased pool of knowledge and experiences among workers. This collection of knowledge and experience improves the performance of individual workers and workgroups as a whole, and often improves morale and job satisfaction.
Physical proximity supports group work by enabling group members to enter informal, unplanned interactions. In particular, in working environments where group members share nearby offices and workspaces, there is often an awareness of which other group members are present. This enables one group member to easily contact the other group member present and initiate a dialogue with that person on some issue of concern. The awareness of others is known to be important for enabling spontaneous, and impromptu interactions that in turn facilitate workers in coordinating their actions, and creating shared understanding of common issues. The ability to informally interact in this manner provides significant benefits to the business, and the awareness workers have of other workers facilitates this ability to interact.
Group members often have many similar or overlapping tasks to perform, and common sources of information or data to use in working on various aspects of a common problem. Many of the informal interactions between group members are directed to solving common problems in these tasks. Encountering colleagues in the course of these activities often provides opportunities for informal yet effective interpersonal communication. The awareness of other workers further facilitates the sharing of issues related to common tasks or functions.
However, several trends are combining to make it hard for work groups to stay cohesive. As organizations get larger in size, members of work groups often get distributed among different buildings on a campus, or even to globally distributed geographical sites. Companies are also embracing flexible work schedules, telecommuting, and working-at-home programs. The escalating use of computers in the corporate workplace further influences these trends.
All of these trends combine to detract from the physical access that work groups traditionally shared by being in close physical proximity to each other. An increasing amount of group work is accomplished through electronically mediated mechanisms, such as networked computer systems, facsimiles, video teleconferencing and the like. While these electronic facilities can very efficiently aid the flow of raw information across physical distances that may separate group members, they do not provide the same rich sense of awareness and opportunities for interaction shared by people who work physically in the same location.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a computer-based mechanism that provides to distributed work group members an analogue of the sense of awareness shared by workers who are physically near each other. In a desirable collaborative computer system, applications should gracefully provide awareness of other people who are "task proximate." Workers are task proximate when they are working on the same or related data, with the same or related applications, at about the same time. A desirable mechanism further provides a way for people to initiate a conversation or other encounter with another person who is task proximate and with whom they would like to interact.
Computer implemented communication devices of many varieties are known, but they fail to provide a generalized mechanism that produces an awareness of other workers having similar tasks for any variety of tasks. Some conventional products provide very limited information targeted to a specific type of application. For example, a conventional web browser for accessing the World Wide Web (WWW) can only determine if two or more different users are on the same web page at the same time. Both users must have the same web browser application and the web page must be provided by a web server compatible with the web browsers. This limits the awareness of others to a very small and specific community of users and computing resources. Moreover, because the implementation is designed to determine only whether there is more than one user on the same web page, such a product fails to provide a generalized system architecture that can be used with various different applications to determine whether individuals are performing related tasks on related data in various time periods of use. Further, such products do not provide a generalized user interface that indicates the relationship between the tasks different workers are performing and that facilitates communication with them.
Other conventional products rely on geographic models to simulate shared environments of a community of users. Examples of these include Multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and MUDs, object-oriented (MOOs). These mechanisms provide a virtual space through which users navigate, interacting with other users sharing the same room or location in the virtual space. These mechanisms are based entirely on a location-oriented model of the virtual space, and not on a task-oriented model. Further, MOOs and MUDs are designed for use as their own environment, in a sense their own application, rather than an architecture with which other applications can operate and provide task proximity information. In addition, most MOOs and MUDs are used for entertainment purposes, and specifically to meet other users.
Other conventional computer tools merely provide directed communication facilities. For example, email or video-conferencing products allow a user to directly communicate with other workers in a particular mode. However, these products provide no information about the task proximity of users. Rather, these tools are intended for a user who already knows they want to communicate with a particular person or group of persons. Thus, they do not facilitate the type of spontaneous interactions enabled by an awareness of users who are task proximate to one another.